Give a Little, Get a Little: Optimal Recruitment Efforts for Wellness Initiatives

Will Clower, Ph.D.

Feb 8, 2010

Introduction

We know that effective wellness programming produces happier, healthier employees. If your employee base suddenly, magically, lost weight, stopped smoking, and hummed through their day with stress-free smiles on their pleasant faces, healthcare utilization would plummet, along with any systemic absenteeism that may be present. It is also clear that these happier, healthier employees are more productive through the workday.

Even though this “perfect world” abstraction will never happen, we all want to move as far toward that ideal as possible. And this begs the question: how can we design outreach strategies that maximize our attempts to motivate employees to take the first steps in that direction?

Below, I am going to talk about incentive strategies that we have provided for companies of various sizes. As in any real-world situation, there are Pros and Cons of each. In fact, any of the strategies outlined below would work, depending on your specific corporate culture of health, and the goals desired.

• Incentive Strategy 1: Full Subsidy

The most obvious way to engage employees is to simply pay for everything. Lower all barriers to entry and, in theory, no reason could possibly remain to prevent participation. In other words, leading your horse, by hand to water, should produce ample and grateful drinking.

However, anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes working with humans realizes that theory may work in theory, but often fails in practice.

• Pros
  
  • If you need numbers, if you need people to get on board and get exposed to a wellness program, full subsidy is a great first pass. This is a wide net approach that effectively maximizes exposure to wellness programming.
• Cons
  
  • Employees have no skin in the game. They have nothing at stake. One major financial institution paid for our program outright. Around 1,000 employees signed up for one of them and, while that was terrific, only about half of them completed it. They had no incentive to complete on their commitment.
• If you go this way, here how to optimize it
  • One insurance group deployed this strategy, but did so successfully because they had a longstanding history of wellness promotion within their organization. Their employee adherence was closer to 70%. There were the predictable drop offs, but a sustained presence of wellness programming within the organization created it as natural part of the culture.
  • If you go this way, plan on sticking with this approach over the long term. You will see a ramp up in participation as you build your corporate culture of health.
  • Incentive Strategy 2: No subsidy
  • Sometimes you identify programs that would be ideal for your employees, but may not be covered in your current plan. Adding a wide diversity of opportunities only increases the breadth of employee options, serving more of your people in more ways. This kind of diversity can make for a great solution.
  • For many HR directors and benefits managers, having something to offer – other than static resources on a webpage – is fantastic. But these added options often represent added costs. And with finite resources available for employee wellness programming, it would be best to let them participate if they choose, at their expense.
• Pros
  
  • Requiring your employees to pay for a new program offers some unique advantages. It allows you to “test drive” a given approach or technique – do your employees actually crave yoga classes in the morning, healthy cooking classes via webcast, or a 30-minute aerobics stint before the afternoon commute home. This approach allows you to assess demand, en route to a more comprehensive approach that truly meets their needs.
• Cons
  • First, cost. Second, cost. Third, cost. Requiring employees to provide full payment will be a non-starter for some, and will ultimately prevent those people who may need it the most from accessing wellness programming.
• If you go this way, here how to optimize it
  • Present the information in tiers, so employees understand that they are being given an expanded range of options across content and cost. Also, let employees know that these programs are available based on their participation, giving them choices that are ultimately based on their needs.
  • Partial subsidy
• Pros
  • The employees recognize that you support them, and there is no clearer statement, then when you provide even a portion of monetary support for a program they are interested in. Plus, everyone feels like they are getting a bargain if the actual cost is less than the “retail cost”.
• Cons
  • An incentive payment encourages enrollment without also encouraging follow through. This strategy will gain a higher number of participants for wellness initiatives, but is not the best way to ensure follow-through.
• If you go this way, here how to optimize it
  • Make your contribution more than a token. Roughly one-half is a good benchmark, and tells the employees that you are ready to be as committed to their wellbeing as they are. Meet them at least half-way.
  • The best case scenario is to base the reimbursement on their participation – when they complete the program milestones, they receive the employer contribution. This gives them some skin in the game, demonstrates commitment to their wellbeing, and ensures that the greatest number complete on their wellness goals.

Award-winning author Dr. Will Clower applies his neuroscience knowledge to explain how the Mediterranean culture can enjoy their rich healthy foods and still be thinner than us, with healthy hearts and longer lives.

After earning his neuroscience Ph.D., Dr. Clower went to France for two years to do research on the brain, but found the French fascinating enough. The cultural habits of these thin, healthy people intrigued him to write the highly-praised cultural comparison, The Fat Fallacy.

Dr. Clower’s breakthrough work has been featured everywhere from The View with Barbara Walters, Fox News, CBS, and ABCNews, to USA Today, New York Times, Readers Digest, and Cosmopolitan Magazine. His work has also garnered recommendations by luminaries such as Julia Child, Peter Mayle, Dr. Dean Edell, and Susan Loomis.

A national media presence: With humor and clarity, Dr. Clower simplifies the complexities of healthy eating, boiling complicated ideas into easily digestible bites. Dr. Clower is a frequent health expert for the Los Angeles NPR station KCRW, as well as for WRXQ in Washington DC. In print, he has contributed original work for Marie Claire Magazine, many national dailies, along with his quarterly column for Table Magazine.

The PATH Curriculum:

In The PATH Curriculum, Dr. Clower now brings his skills as an educator to bear in a corporate wellness environment, medical centers, and academic institutions.

The PATH Curriculum makes the results of the healthy Mediterranean lifestyle – low weight, healthy hearts, and longer lives – accessible to Americans.

This Mediterranean approach is now run at the Diabetes Research Institute at the University of Miami, to investigate the control of glucose for diabetics. These investigation center on the adoption of the Mediterranean food guide pyramid, along with condition healthy eating behaviors for long term control.

Work on childhood obesity: Dr. Clower was awarded the “Healthy School Hero” for his contributions to the Action For Healthy Kids Organization. AFHK is a national organization started by First Lady Laura Bush and former Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher to reduce childhood obesity by raising the nutrition and activity standards in our nation’s schools. Clower’s work has also been applied to a successful program for school children (6th – 8th grades) in Pittsburgh and New York City.